Going to Water
Eddy Lawrence
Snow Plow Records
2001
14 tracks
It may just be my age but, as I listened to Eddy Lawrence, I got to thinking about Marvin Rainwater. The more I think about Rainwater, the more I can see similarities between the two artists. The more I explore the work of Lawrence, the more I can see the differences. It's an interesting exercise to compare a talented new writer and performer with a star of years past.
Marvin Rainwater is a Cherokee Indian, full-blooded as far as I know. Eddy Lawrence is half-Cherokee. The songs of both artists make some reference to their ancestry. Marvin Rainwater was making rockabilly hits back when artists like George Jones and Buck Owens were still singing rock and roll. Eddy Lawrence rocks with the best of them. The pop country song "Gonna Find Me A Bluebird" gave Marvin Rainwater world-wide fame. Songs like "Birdtown" and "Radio Bingo" by Eddy Lawrence have that same pop music feel. "As a Broken Arrow" is pure country.
Forty years later, the world in which Rainwater wrote and performed seems a whole lot simpler than our 21st Century world. Accordingly, his songs tended to have simple straightforward themes. They were popular songs not meant to evoke a lot of deep thought. A closer look at the lyrics of Eddy Lawrence reveal a philosopher's mind at work. Here's an educated man taking a wry look at the world around him. While most of the songs work well on a pop music level, to unravel some of the references in the songs may require at least a Bachelor's degree. Lawrence's lyrics are rich with the history of America from the perspective of the First Nations and the love/hate relationship between them and the Europeans who had overflowed their shores.
Lawrence's songs fall somewhere into that genre of countrified rock and roll inhabited by artists like Tom Petty and Bruce Hornsby. It's hardcore rock and roll music overlaid with thoughtful lyrics and melodies that have a large country element. Ignoring for a moment the political and social activism that infuses most of these lyrics, this hard-driving music should be popular both on the reservation and off, both in the country and in the city. Beneath the words, this is just plain good rock and roll.
According to the notes, Lawrence wrote all of these songs. "Radio Bingo" caught me by surprise. It sounds like a medley of something Lawrence wrote and another song, the two melodies interweaving. Early into this bilingual (Cherokee and English?) song, I started to hear the oft-covered 1931 song "Dream a Little Dream of Me" covered in large sections of both the melody and the guitar lead. The first time I listened, it took me a while to realize that this song was actually about playing bingo and not seduction.
"El Barzón" is a quirky, wonderful confusion of popular music and Economics 101. This politically-informed lyric relies heavily on allusions to the influential 18th Century Scottish economist and social philosopher Adam Smith to create a metaphor for the historic financial inequities between the European newcomers and the original natives of North America. If you don't know about the economic theories of Adam Smith and his "invisible hand" and if you don't have enough Spanish to understand that El Barzón refers to the yoke of debt, then this lyric may not make a whole lot of sense. It doesn't matter. The bright Tex-Mex music with its thump-thump rhythm carries the mysterious lyric effortlessly along. This political song will sneak up and catch the listener somewhere in mid-groove.
With a lyric imbued with clan mysticism, political philosophy, and not so subtle activism, "Turtles" rolls over the musical landscape with a rock steady reggae rhythm that seems unstoppable. It's a song that manages somehow to provoke the listener to both thought and dance. A neat trick, that.
The lyrics are dense and rich with imagery and history. These well-written lyrics bear a closer listen or a very close read. The music, ranging from pop country to hard rock and roll is extremely listenable. It should get play not just on niche stations at colleges and on the reservation, but on radio stations everywhere that play the best music. Every song is as good as the next.
You can find out more about Eddy Lawrence and his music at Snow Plow Records. Four of the songs on this release are available as thirty second sample clips or as longer mp3 downloads at Amazon.com.
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Review written: April 13, 2005
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